I’m in ur browser, chatting in 3D
New virtual world platforms have been popping up almost daily for the last couple of weeks: Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock, and I’m sure I forgot a couple. This is a new generation of virtual worlds, eager to show that they’ve learned from the mistakes of Second Life: Browser based! Embeddable in your web page! More fun graphics! Integrated with FaceBook!
Right now (and I realize it is still early), they just seem like more 3D chat rooms, similar to what Meez and IMVU have been offering for a while. To me, this type of platform is not that interesting. I want to be able to create things with other people, and explore environments and tools that others have built. So, I tend to dismiss those environments that seem to focus on just chat - they obviously don’t get it! Of course, IMVU reports that they have more than twenty million users, so maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it (or, perhaps, people are different and like different things. Looking at Richard Bartle’s classification of player types - Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, might help us understand what type of person prefers what type of virtual world).
Some of the new-comers are showing glimmers of moving beyond the simple chat rooms: Lively will allow Google Gadgets to be integrated in the 3D space, ExitReality automatically converts a web page into a 3D environment, and JustLeapIn “premium” room templates are much larger than the rooms of of other platforms, allowing plenty of opportunity for exploration.
However, I want to point out a story that’s told about Second Life’s beginnings. Philip Rosedale, describes how at a meeting where an early version of Second Life had been demonstrated, the agenda moved from the demo to a discussion about finances. However, the screen stayed on as “background entertainment” (cutting and pasting Rosedale’s story below from 3PointD):
What happened was, we were watching the background, and we realized this city was emerging, very, very fast, it was this incredible thing. We all started getting drawn more and more back to the screen. We started talking about it, and a snowman showed up, Andrew built a snowman, and I don’t know if it was broken at the beginning, but then somebody else built a sort of burning man, with a bunch of small snowmen bowing down to the greater snowman, and so you could see this jazz thing happening in real time. There had never been a canvas in which two people could paint that way at the same time, much less three or four or five.
That was this moment of change in that board meeting where we said, you know, it’s not necessarily about the wind working really well. It’s actually about people making things together. What’s going to come out of this is cities and intention and collaboration and community, because the capability this thing provides is mysterious in the degree to which is allows people to do things together.
What enabled this “moment of change” was the in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration. Chatting in a 3D environment may be good, but extending that chat with 3D forms of expression gives us a whole new way of communicating.
I couldn’t agree more, I just quoted Rosedales line in my blog because it helds so much. Btw - there is 3B rooms (3b.net), kind of a “MySpace in 3D” (for your list) and Cobalt, based on the Croquet project (opencroquet.org), which is a more educational and mature approach
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I definitely agree with the first part, virtual environments are about more than ‘chatting in 3D’ but remember ‘not everyone wants to be a designer’. Only a small percentage of Flickr users, youTube users, blog readers etc actually participates in content creation. The other 95%+ just enjoys browsing the content for either entertainment, information or application.
I don’t particularly like Rosedales ‘anecdote’ for a collaborative model because lets face it, if Second Life was build for 3D collaboration they could have done a lot better, and furthermore, the actual use of Second Life as a digital ‘canvas’ is fairly limited. Its not about creating things together, its about the ability to provide diverse, niche context. Niche enough to become a topic of conversation. You can’t create that top down, its impossible to create content that interests every single niche (and the more niche, the more passionate people are about the topic because it starts to define them). However, when the creation of this content is placed in the hands of the users themselves to express these niche interests they are passionate about, it becomes possible to provide this niche content, effectively filling the ‘long tail’ of social context.
So the free content creation, even by a small percentage of total users, provides the platform with the ’social object’ for others to use - like clips on youTube and pictures on flickr. It’s the topic of conversation - the icebreaker to approach a stranger and just start talking about a shared interest. Lively and other chatrelated worlds lack this incentive because largely they are still being developed by a small group of developers. They develop for the masses - missing out on the long tail of social context that feeds 99% of social interactions on social networks.
PS - Lively is about to provide these tools, though the advantage of Second Life is it provides these tools inside the application itself, as part of the package, stimulating the creation and thereby social interaction tremendously.
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